vanishing vegetables
Reading a recent post by serenn at irishfoodies about a visit to Deasy's seafood restaurant near Clonakilty (southwest Ireland) I skidded to a halt at this: 'I had monkfish on mashed sweet potatoes with tomato and basil on the side. He had hake wrapped in Parma ham on a bed of ordinary mash. This was served with fresh veg (fried cabbage, courgettes, mashed carrot, green beans and a seperate dish of sliced boiled potaotes ...'
I realised then how far from home I was, culinarily speaking. That dish would be impossible to find in a restaurant here in the south of France. Unfeasable. Inconceivable. Almost illegal, in its disregard for French culinary practice, and in its use of, of ... well - vegetables! And not just one, but eight! And not on separate plates, but - all together! And presumably hot, and apparently alarmingly tasty.
Sacré Bleu! Is there no depth too low to which those perfidious Engli - er, Irish will not stoop in their pandering to the tastes and desires of the mere customer? Now, taking one random restaurant in Ireland and comparing it to one local restaurant here in the Languedoc and trying to build an entire theory about cultural difference & culinary disjunction is arrogant and foolish - but, as you may have begun to suspect as we neared the end of this sentence - I'm going to do it anyway.
First a canter through a couple of centuries of cooking. Auguste Escoffier invented French haute cuisine and extolled its virtues throughout Europe. Simply put: you take something, do something to it; then do something else to it. It was built on the idea of the master sauce. A lump of protein was cooked in a pan, and what was left in the pan was deglazed with wine or stock, ornamented with butter or cream, and then poured back over the protein. It was a fancified appropriation of what French peasant women had been doing for centuries - aka la cuisine de grande-mère or cuisine de terroir.
Here it is in action : - Timbale of Lobster:- Catch three lobsters. Season with salt, pepper and curry. Sauté in a mirepoix (onions, carrots, celery & raw ham diced fine & stewed in butter with herbs) simmer with cognac, port, double cream & fish stock for 20 minutes. Remove lobsters, keep warm & reduce the liquid. Add two egg yolks and 150 grams of sweet butter ...' and so on, and on.
Then in the Sixties, there was a reaction against the deadening weight of gastronomic tradition. Nouvelle cuisine emphasised fresh ingredients, welcomed oriental flavours and techniques and prized lightness. It was a culinary revolution. Since then it has become something of a parody of itself, going to extremes of silly minimalism, where one is not sure if what is on the plate is decorative art - or the actual meal.
Neither Ireland nor England have felt the dead hand of Authority on their dining pleasures. Cooking was allowed to evolve in a haphazard, democratic way - and largely without rules. It is a cooking that puts the eater, the consumer - the customer! - first. We do not like to be told what tastes best - we are perfectly capable of deciding that ourselves. And by having a variety of food-stuffs on the plate at the same time - it allows the diner to actually construct the meal as desired. Flavours and textures can be combined at will! No wonder le Chef disapproves: it displaces him from his perch.
And the struggle between the three tendencies - haute cuisine/grande-mère/nouvelle is still not resolved: we have seen some spectacular crashes involving all three on one menu in a local restaurant. David - the highly talented young chef - is torn between the new international cooking (he devours the recent wave of books from Ireland & the U.K.), and the classics of style haute, and the demands of local gourmands - ah yes, les gros messieurs - who want their plats du terroir piled high with meat.
We asked him why no restaurants featured fresh vegetables, when the markets and shops were bursting with a colourful cornucopia of them. It was the fault of the employment tax laws, apparently: he is so busy doing things to lumps of meat and fiddling with sauces that he has no time to prepare vegetables - and he can't afford a separate cook to do it.
I'm not convinced: I feel that, in this country of egalité et fraternité (sororitée?) there are hidden hierarchies, and meat will always be top - topped with sauce, of course.
Gargantua : Gustave Doré